Notre Dame SPN — From the Ground Up: An Analysis of Land Value Tax in Cincinnati, Ohio

Summary

"From the Ground Up: An Analysis of Land Value Tax in Cincinnati, Ohio" (15 July 2026) is a parcel-level simulation report by the University of Notre Dame's undergraduate Student Policy Network (SPN, project leads Curtis Brashaw and Rowan Miller, with a seven-member student team), prepared in partnership with the Center for Land Economics (CLE), whose executive director Greg Miller is credited for guidance. It is the third entry in a running series of SPN/CLE city-level parcel simulations, following the South Bend, IN and Princeton, NJ studies already on the wiki as Miller & Hoskins (2025-26) — the same genre (revenue-neutral split-rate re-allocation of an actual assessment roll), a new city, and, unlike South Bend, not a college town.

The report's occasion is Ohio Senate Joint Resolution 7, a pending state constitutional amendment that would let Ohio municipalities opt in to a split-rate or land value tax locally — not a mandate, and not yet adopted anywhere in the state. Cincinnati currently taxes land and improvements at one uniform rate; the report models what a revenue-neutral 4:1 land-to-improvement split rate would do to Cincinnati's actual property-tax roll if SJR 7 passed and the city chose to use it.

Methodology

Working with the Center for Land Economics, the team used Hamilton County parcel-level assessor data (full market land and improvement values, taxable values, property type, and parcel-level exemption/abatement data) merged with Census data for neighborhood income. They rebuilt each parcel's current tax bill under Ohio's uniform-rate formula — Tax = 0.35 × mills × (Land + Improvement − Exemptions) — and compared it to a revenue-neutral 4:1 split-rate scenario (land millage 13.8 vs. improvement millage 3.4).

Two scope limits are stated up front and matter for reading the dollar figures: (1) because SJR 7 does not reach the full stack of overlapping levies, the model is restricted to Cincinnati's own 6.1-mill general operating levy only — a small slice of a typical parcel's total 69-mill bill (the school district alone levies 41.2 mills), so the reported dollar changes are not a full property-tax-bill impact; (2) ~30 agricultural parcels were held at their existing assessment because the team suspected some of their "improvement" value is really land improvement misclassified as land value, flagged for future research rather than resolved.

Findings

Underdevelopment scale. $1.87 billion in land value, across 24,627 parcels (roughly one in five of Cincinnati's taxable parcels), is vacant or severely underdeveloped: $370M on 16,710 fully vacant parcels; $520M on 2,475 "extremely underdeveloped" parcels (buildings under 10% of value); $140M on 949 "highly underdeveloped" parcels (10-25%); and $840M on 4,493 parcels where improvements are 25-50% of value.

A worked example (Over-the-Rhine). At Central Ave & Findlay St, a surface parking lot pays $2,260/year (~$0.09/sq ft) versus $6,140/year (~$1.99/sq ft) for the adjacent low-income housing unit — the housing pays about 22 times as much per square foot as the parking lot under the current uniform-rate tax.

Category-level impact under the modeled 4:1 shift (median % change, aggregate net revenue change, parcel count — from the report's own charts, which carry more detail than its prose):

The single-family and office categories show a median cut with a net revenue increase — the report explains this as a minority of higher-value parcels (larger lots, more land-heavy assessments) paying enough more to outweigh a majority paying modestly less; it is not an inconsistency, but it is easy to misread from the executive summary alone, which reports only the median.

Share of parcels moving more than 10%: 100% of vacant-land parcels rise more than 10% (0% fall); 63-70% of multi-family parcels (large and small) fall more than 10%; single-family splits roughly half-and-half (50% fall >10%, 23% rise >10%, the remainder inside ±10%).

By neighborhood income quintile (all residential): Q1 (lowest) −16.7%, Q2 −17.0%, Q3 −11.0%, Q4 −10.3%, Q5 (highest) +10.7% median tax change — a progressive gradient the report attributes to wealthier neighborhoods having larger, higher-value structures relative to their land (so they gain less from the improvement-tax cut and carry more of the land-tax increase).

Four illustrative parcels (report's Figure 8, current 6.1-mill bill vs. modeled 4:1 bill): a Downtown vacant commercial lot ($11.1M land value) rises from $23,729 to $53,643 (+126.1%); a Riverside industrial warehouse ($1.14M improvement value) falls $57 (−1.8%); a Corryville two-family home falls $79 (−14.2%); a Mt. Lookout single-family home falls $101 (−7.3%).

Land Value Tax in Practice — the Report's Case Comparisons

The report frames its Cincinnati model against three precedents, all of which the wiki already covers in more depth:

Pittsburgh. The report treats 1913-2001 as one continuous success story — the city "tested" the graded tax, prominent 1960s leaders credited it with a "significant supporting role," and the 2001 repeal (citing Hughes 2006) "raised taxes for 14 of Pittsburgh's poorest districts, and lowered taxes for 18 of the wealthiest districts." What the report does not mention is the specific mechanism its own footnoted source, Oates & Schwab (1997), actually studies: Pittsburgh held a flat 2:1 land-to-building ratio from 1913 to 1979, then sharply escalated to roughly 5:1 in 1979-80 — it is that escalation, not the 1913 law itself, that precedes the 1980s building-permit boom in the natural-experiment literature. The wiki's own Pittsburgh page and Pennsylvania page carry the fuller, independently sourced timeline (including the 2001 repeal's actual cause — a court-ordered countywide reassessment crisis, not a policy failure of the split rate itself) and are the better citation for a reader who wants the dated history.

Allentown. The report dates Allentown's split rate to 1996 (land 5.038% / buildings 1.072%), reports "almost 75 percent of properties saw some sort of tax cut," and cites Joshua Vincent's Strong Towns piece for a 32% rise in building permits versus neighboring Bethlehem. This is consistent with the wiki's existing (brief) mentions of Allentown's 1996 adoption in Pennsylvania and Split-Rate Taxation, though the wiki does not yet carry a dedicated Allentown research or place page with independently verified permit data — this report's figures are not yet cross-checked against a peer-reviewed source and should be read as the advocates' own account pending that.

Sydney. The report's Sydney section leans on a single 1925 advocacy pamphlet (J. R. Firth, for the United Committee for the Taxation of Land Values) to credit New South Wales' 1895 land tax with Sydney's 1900-1920 population doubling and "limited overcrowding." This is the weakest-sourced of the three comparisons — a century-old advocacy source making a strong causal claim with no comparison city — and the report does not engage its own later citation (an ABC News piece on why Sydney's skyline stayed short) that attributes Sydney's famously low-rise built form mainly to height restrictions, in some tension with the "the land tax drove building upward" claim two paragraphs earlier. The wiki's New South Wales and Australia pages are better starting points for verified detail on the NSW land tax.

Relation to the Georgist Case

This is an advocacy-institute simulation study, not independent or peer-reviewed research — the same genre as Bowman & Bell's Virginia parcel studies and, most directly, the Miller & Hoskins South Bend/Princeton reports from the same CLE partnership. It is a static, current-year re-allocation of an existing tax base under a hypothetical rate schedule — it does not model how any owner would actually respond (redevelop, sell, hold, or pass costs to tenants), despite prose in the Impacts sections asserting that landlords "could" pass savings to renters or that developers "will" build faster. The report's own framing is explicitly advocacy-directed: both partner organizations hold that a shift is desirable before the modeling begins, and the conclusion argues for the policy ("switching from a unified tax rate to a land value tax is imperative") rather than reporting a neutral finding.

The direction of its results is broadly consistent with the wiki's stronger, quasi-experimental evidence base — the incentive-against-idle-land finding echoes Oates & Schwab, Plassmann & Tideman, and the Pennsylvania panels on split-rate-increases-construction; the progressive income-quintile gradient echoes Bowman & Bell's Roanoke finding rather than England & Zhao's regressive Dover finding on land-value-tax-can-be-progressive. But consistency with a modeled result is not the same as confirming it: this report supplies arithmetic on Cincinnati's own parcel roll, not a new causal test.

Nuances and Limits — What This Report Does Not Establish

• No behavioral response is modeled. Every figure above is a same-year re-billing of the existing assessment roll under a new rate schedule — not a prediction of what owners would actually build, sell, or charge in rent. Claims like "could translate to lower rents" or "developers... can do so more quickly" are asserted, not modeled.
• Partial-levy scope. The dollar changes cover only Cincinnati's 6.1-mill city operating levy, roughly 9% of a typical parcel's ~69-mill total bill. The report states this restriction explicitly in its methodology, but a reader who only sees the executive summary's "$26 a year" could easily mistake this for the full property-tax impact.
• Nothing has been adopted. Ohio has no split-rate or LVT authority today; SJR 7 is a pending constitutional amendment, and even if it passes, Cincinnati would still need a separate local decision to opt in. This is prospective modeling of a two-step-contingent policy, not a record of an implemented reform.
• Not peer-reviewed; undergraduate authorship with an advocacy partner. SPN is a student club; CLE is a Georgist-mission research nonprofit. Both approached the project already favoring the outcome — visible in the report's own promotional language ("we tax the wrong thing," "the benefits... would be profound"). This does not make the parcel arithmetic wrong, but it means the report should be read as the advocates' own analysis, not independent confirmation, exactly as the wiki already treats its South Bend/Princeton siblings.
• Historical case studies are secondary, not re-derived. The Pittsburgh, Allentown, and Sydney sections rely on a mix of advocacy blogs (Strong Towns, Land Value Tax Guide) and, for Sydney, a 1925 advocacy pamphlet — none independently re-analyzed by the authors, and the Pittsburgh account omits the 1979-80 mechanism that the wiki's own flagship citation turns on (see above).
• No sensitivity analysis. The report does not explain why 4:1 was chosen over other land-to-improvement ratios, nor test how the results would change under a milder or more aggressive split.

Bears On

These findings are directionally relevant to three existing wiki claim pages, but — matching how the wiki already treats the sibling Miller & Hoskins reports — are not added to any claim page's formal supported_by evidence lane: a prospective, advocacy-commissioned, non-peer-reviewed single-city simulation is corroborating context, not new independent evidence.

• Benefit: Split-rate taxation increases urban construction — the 100%-of-vacant-parcels tax increase and the report's own framing ("creating direct pressure to develop or sell") is the same anti-speculation mechanism this page documents empirically in Pennsylvania and Finland; Cincinnati adds a fresh prospective illustration, not a new observed outcome.
• Benefit: A land value tax can be progressive — the Q1/Q2 −17% vs. Q5 +10.7% quintile gradient is a genuinely new US-city data point on the progressive side of that page's two-sided evidence record, echoing Bowman & Bell's Roanoke result.
• Objection: LVT hurts the "asset-rich, cash-poor" — about one in four Cincinnati single-family homeowners would pay more, and the wealthiest quintile sees an +10.7% median increase; this is additional, notably softer raw material for that objection's steelman than the South Bend (52.5% of homesteads rising) and Princeton (4,724 of 7,135 residential parcels rising) figures already cited there.

See Also

• Miller & Hoskins — College-Town LVT Shift Simulations (South Bend, IN and Princeton, NJ) — the same SPN/CLE partnership's two prior reports
• Center for Land Economics — the report's partner organization
• Oates & Schwab (1997): The Pittsburgh Experience · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · Pennsylvania
• New South Wales · Australia
• Split-Rate Taxation · Split-rate taxation increases urban construction
• A land value tax can be progressive
• Objection: LVT hurts the "asset-rich, cash-poor"

Sources

1. Notre Dame Student Policy Network (project leads Curtis Brashaw and Rowan Miller; project members Julia Connolly, William Ehrhard, William Huguenin-Virchaux, Grace Hunt, Kyle Lauckner, Brett Molka, Daniella Morales-Garibay, Dalton Vaughn), prepared in partnership with the Center for Land Economics (15 July 2026), "From the Ground Up: An Analysis of Land Value Tax in Cincinnati, Ohio." PDF — used for all Cincinnati parcel-level findings, methodology, and figures 1-8 (including chart/table images not captured by the PDF's text layer) and the Pittsburgh/Allentown/Sydney case summaries; fetched and read in full (25 pages) this session.
2. Wallace E. Oates & Robert M. Schwab (1997), "The Impact of Urban Land Taxation: The Pittsburgh Experience," National Tax Journal 50(1) — wiki summary — used to check the report's Pittsburgh account against the wiki's existing, more precise 1979-80 escalation timeline.
3. Mark Alan Hughes (2006), "Why So Little Georgism in America," Lincoln Institute of Land Policy — cited (via the Cincinnati report's own footnote) for the 2001 Pittsburgh repeal's distributional effect; the wiki's Pittsburgh page carries this source directly with the "54% of homeowners paid more" finding, a more precise figure than the Cincinnati report's unverified "14 poorest / 18 wealthiest districts" claim.
4. Greg Miller & Stephen Hoskins (2025-26), "New Reports: Land Value Taxes in College Towns," Progress and Poverty Institute — wiki summary — used as the comparison genre (the same SPN/CLE partnership's prior South Bend and Princeton simulations) and for the grading pattern this entry follows.